YMMV / Crankshaft

• Ass Pull: Pete and Mindy resurrecting the Montoni's restaurant from parent strip Funky Winkerbean near the end of 2023 took many turns that took more critical readers off-guard. From Pete abandoning his career as a comic book writer due to fears of the industry's impending failure (despite having success as a movie writer and the notoriously risky business of restaurant management by comparison) to the reopening occurring barely even a month after making the purchase deal with Funky, showing little prep-work besides setting up Christmas decorations and not even being shown as having any employees (aside from the mysterious "Pizza Monster" being a "silent partner" in the purchase), complete with an overt show of holiday heartwarming via local residents returning all the Montoni's fixtures that had been sold at auction during its closure for free on Christmas Eve, bringing Funky to tears.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In 2009, there was a week-long arc that appeared to show Ed in the future living in a nursing home. He is hooked up to oxygen and barely conscious throughout the whole thing, and his nurse takes him to a Mudhens baseball game. Then the strip went back to normal without comment. Finally, in late 2010, a storyline ran where Ed and a one of his old baseball buddies went to visit their former teammate "Beanball" Bushka... who lives in a nursing home, is hooked up to oxygen, and looks exactly like a 90-year-old Ed Crankshaft.
• Crosses the Line Twice: There was a mild controversy based on a strip that had Crankshaft telling his girlfriend she was too old to worry about sexual assault.
• Fridge Logic: That a ball player as good as Crankshaft was supposed to be would only get one shot at impressing big league scouts.
• Moral Event Horizon: A September 2013 plot arc has Crankshaft get even surlier than usual because a new co-worker is challenging his reign of smug, curmudgeonly idiot incompetence; his response is try to "scare" her into leaving him be the festering asshole using his hard life as an excuse to be the antisocial clod he was born to be... by trying to run her over with his school bus.
• Narm: Bushka Sr. is bragging — fifty years after the fact — about how he screwed Crankshaft out his shot at the big leagues. Readers were supposed to see him as a villain, but he came across as a sad old man whose personal Moment of Awesome was a petty act of For the Evulz.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: A May 2021 arc involved the Valentine Theater facing closure due to the pandemic. But every marquee and promotional poster is for Radio Ranch, the film-length version of the strange 1935 serial The Phantom Empire, which Tom Batiuk is obsessed with. It's obvious why they're not attracting customers.

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